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Posts Tagged ‘Ludumdare’

I’m just posting a shorter version of my entry’s post-mortem, since I just typed up a longer version of it on my dev blog, here.

I didn’t really expect to finish my entry for this 36th jam, even with my poor planning, but I suprisingly did, unfortunately with many features cut out.

Because I had to cut out a lot of features, the gameplay was not very good, as pointed out by other people here who played it.

As far as a story for the game went, I didn’t put too much time into it, since the gameplay and graphics will strongly overshadow it. It was kept to a very minimum.

I was most proud of the game’s graphics, since it fared better than the other parts of the game. I also had the most fun creating the sprites and stuff.

As a first LD jam entry, I felt that it wasn’t bad at all, despite the lackluster gameplay. If this is a game that you guys would like to be developed further, post LD, it’d be great to hear your thoughts. If you haven’t played Glutenburg yet, check out my entry here.

We didn’t post anything yet cuz we were hard in the developing proccess,
To sum up, we could be in a way deeper progress of a game. (everyone says that? ><)

Our force for this ludum dare contains:
Rom and Tom-Programmers sitting next to each other and working non-stop (full time)
Artur-Pro Designer (when he doesn’t work)
Ilya-Pro Designer (when he doesn’t work)

Our First Day:

We thought about making a physic game using levers/swing as ancient technology, this is what we came up with:

All tough it came up kinda fun and funny, we saw no potential in keep developing it (it may be too repetitive)

We reconsidered our options, thinking about more ancient technologies and we came up with pulleys (video).
We decided to take the risk and test those pulleys.

after wasting like 5 hours thinking about these pulleys and how we gonna make them intersting we crashed.Day 2:

We wasted most of day 2 testing and trying to implement the most fun yet realistic physics and gameplay.
Working with Game Maker using Box2D, we tried using built in pulley joints, but we found it too basic for our needs.

after hours of work in the end of day 2, we ended up with this:

You play as a well-known architect in Egypt, you’re there to solve their problems and well, mainly help them build their pyramids.
you do it by stretching ropes through the map.
The more we played with these mechanics the more we saw what a great potential this game has, hopefully we will think of some great puzzles tomorrow

I’m in for a second try at Ludum Dare. My first one was a year ago, and I really overestimated what I could do in such a small amount of time. For this time, I have drastically changed my tools and learned enormous amounts of programming skills since then, which should help a lot. I also hopefully got my streaming setup right this time. Like last time, I’m entering the jam in solo, because my friend who was interested in participating with me had some other appointments already.

If you would like to follow my progress, you will be able to find it on twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/thatrepixelated/) hopefully starting between 7:30am and 8:00am GMT time. I will also get my timelapse sorted and most important of all, create something amazing (that I can hopefully post) and enjoy myself in the process.

Also please leave a comment if you have some suggestion because I plan to finish this game and release it for iPads because recently i found out that love2d already supports iOS development.

POST MORTEM:

I think everything worked as I expected. I had this game idea for a week or so before the competition already in mind. I wanted to implement controlling player by modifying the enviroment instead of using the direct controls.

First idea was to move a ball from left to right side of the screen by creating hills and valleys using physics. I didn’t manage to draw the controls for this game on the paper so I went for a simpler solution using the grid. Somewhere in this point a simpler idea of using gravity and collecting something instead of moving from left to right emerged. This led to the robot collecting batteries with a puzzle-like levels using gravity controls and walls to navigate robot through the level. Only problem with puzzle-like game is that creating puzzles takes much time. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to prepare good set of levels but I wanted to try the idea.

Because i was not able to do actual programming until the second half of the second day of the jam due to logistics, I had a plenty of time to come up with a concrete idea and solve almost all the problems. So when I started to program I had a pretty good idea of the game mechanic and what I had to do.

Programming phase was pretty straightforward. I wanted to use Love2D because it is supereasy for prototyping even if I hadn’t much experience with it. I had some experience with lua programming from Codea app from iPad and my previous ludum dare entry. I also did a simple pong game one week before ludum dare as a training

After half day of programming I had the game ready and basic graphics in place. After few hours of sleep I had to go to work on monday and I could show my game to my coleagues(sorry boss :-)). They liked the idea but didn’t like the graphic and there were no levels. Actual player didn’t even look like a robot but more like a ghost back then

After work I rushed home to finish some graphics – draw the robot and create tutorial levels. Luckily I remembered the wonderful Tiled map editor which helped a lot with level creation and it exports directly to a Lua so I saved some time by not implementing any tools.

Anyway I knew I couldn’t make good enough levels because I was still exploring what robot can do. I spent a lot of time putting obstacles in front of the robot and watching its behavior because sometimes I was suprised what can be done using such simple game mechanic (it still surprises me because today i found a simpler solution to one of new levels presented in the gameplay video).

When the time was dangerously passing by, I finished fooling around with the robot and went back to doing actual work. I polished graphic – as I am not any sort of good painter I did my best using piskel app as pixel graphic editor for robot and tiles. Also at this point I found out that I can do a tutorial by drawing directly in the level and showing the gameplay features one by one. I don’t know if this is good or understandable, please let me know in the comments if you find tutorial good!

I showed the game to my brother and he created three of the campaign levels. I had to polish them a little bit afterwards because one of the was not passable and other were easy to get stuck. I wanted that robot won’t get stuck without the possibility to unstuck (Robot cannot react to the modifications to the field has is alread standing at – for example if in the hole where he cannot go left nor right he won’t shapeshift to go up if shapeshift controller placed over the robot).

I though that player should not die/stuck during the game to not feel bad about his skill and won’t get frustrated from starting over so every situation must be resolvable.

Afterwards the time was almost up so I packaged the game and submitted.

Next day I fixed some bug that prevent last level from being finished – spawn point. This was clearly caused because I haven’t had enough time to replay every level after every change.

For the future I plan to create a proper set of levels to illustrate all things that can be done programming the robot using just gravity and walls. All levels I am creating now are resolvable by putting the controls in place before the level starts so instead of rushing during level player can solve the puzzle by thinking before the level starts and preparing the setup for the robot beforehand.

This ludum was enjoyable as always but after this one I feel a little bit special because I really like the resulting game (even bad graphics and no sound and almost no levels 😀 ) mainly because of possibilities it presents.

Super Shapeshift Bros is a 2D local multiplayer-only fighting game with fancy graphics and nice soundtrack (in my own opinion ).

The concept is simple: you control a tiny triangle which can shapeshift into a square. Triangle is lightweight and it’s easier to move. Square has a bigger mass, it can’t be moved by player, but you can use it for stopping at the point you need to stop. Player wins when the other flies away from arena (Like Super Smash Bros, You know ).

After a day and a half, we’ve finished working on our game for the Jam!
The last few hours were mostly us taking turns to play it… 😉
The objective is rather simple – you’re supposed to place any of the cubes on the map where we tell you to. But… there are deadly lasers trying to stop you, as well as a few teleporters that make you seasick whenever you pass through them, and lots of horribly mind-boggling geometry to wrap your head around.
In short, if you want your brain to boil, Glu is all you’ll need for a fancy heater ;p